Germany's dealing with its two difficult pasts – the East German state socialist dictatorship and, much more importantly, Nazism and the Holocaust – has almost universally been considered a success, even a model for others to emulate. Human rights activists and politicians in South Africa, for instance, closely studied German trials, public commemoration and schoolbooks; and the Chinese admonished Japan that, in dealing with the second world war, it should adopt the "German model".

Not surprisingly, this Modell Deutschland was increasingly viewed with pride within Germany itself, especially by the left. Some outside observers picked up on this peculiar form of pride – a kind of anti-nationalist nationalism – and gently mocked it: Timothy Garton Ash, for instance, spoke of Deutsche Industrie-Normen – a German industrial standard – in "coming to terms with the past"; others crowned the Germans "world champions in remembrance".

Today the picture looks different: not from the outside, where fears of a resurgent German nationalism have largely subsided, but from the inside. Critics – often on the left – have argued that both "coming to terms with the Nazi past" and "overcoming the legacies of the GDR" might have been failures after all: in the case of the former, the critics claim that Germans have essentially appropriated the victims of the Holocaust in order to feel good about their own efforts in remembrance.

The centre of Berlin prominently features the Jewish museum, the Topography of Terror (devoted to exploring the workings of the Gestapo), and the Holocaust memorial. But to the critics these are essentially tourist attractions: as former chancellor Gerhard Schröder described them, a "memorial which one enjoys visiting". Remembrance has been set in stone, but, as Robert Musil once remarked, "there is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument". The Jewish wisdom that the secret of memory is redemption – famously quoted in a speech by the former president Richard von Weizsäcker in 1985 – has been vindicated for the Germans, but with a perverse twist: whoever goes through the motions of remembrance need not feel bad or guilty.

And the process of dealing with the East German past? Here critics claim that defenders of the old regime have been allowed to impose a very soft image of the dictatorship, more Goodbye Lenin than The Lives of Others. This is partly because everyone is careful not to equate socialism and national socialism, and partly because the Left party (Die Linke) which has entertained an ambiguous relationship to the East German past, has become a force to be reckoned with. "The supporters of the former dictatorship," former dissident Freya Klier has warned, "sit in the Bundestag, in the media, in schools, in manifold commissions of our democracy." They seek to rehabilitate the Stasi, sue the state about pensions denied to former servants of the regime, and aggressively campaign against commemorating its victims – often in the name of human rights (of those who see themselves as on the losing side of history after 1990).

The upshot is complacency about the past, though of a different kind. A further result, however, is ignorance: in 2008 a highly controversial survey showed that especially East German schoolchildren knew shockingly little about the GDR past; a majority thought the Stasi was an intelligence service like any other; many held that the west had erected the wall and opined that the environment had been cleaner during state socialism.

Are Germans justified, then, in so much tortured self-criticism? Not really. What recent critics are saying seems based on entirely unrealistic expectations, which can only arise because Germany's "memory culture" is particularly highly developed. It would be hard to argue that compared to other central and eastern European post-communist countries, united Germany failed to establish justice for victims of the GDR: lustration and purges were comparatively intensive and extensive, without deteriorating into the kind of witch-hunts that Poland experienced a few years back. And remembrance about both "difficult pasts" – whether in the form of museums or the activities of associations in civil society, or the Stasi archive in Berlin — remains generously funded.

It is true that parts of Die Linke are committed to fighting for a rosier picture of the East German regime – but the more important political fact is that Germany is still one of the few European countries without a successful populist rightwing party. This absence is at least partially explained by the thorough discrediting of nationalism after nazism and the fact that, unlike further east, communist elites did not become corrupt nouveaux riches (and therefore the subject of a rightwing backlash, as in Hungary, for instance).

Remembrance can degenerate into a routine, and consensus about the past is not necessarily a good sign. Many observers rightly concluded that continuous debate – including harsh, personalised controversies – were key to the success of coming-to-terms with nazism in particular. The real Holocaust memorial in Berlin might not be the physical entity designed by architect Peter Eisenman, but the long-lasting, deeply self-searching discussion that preceded its construction. The very fact that the recent critics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung have found such a strong echo proves them wrong. And the debate about the current Hitler exhibition in Berlin might be the next major controversy that keeps the German culture of remembrance as rich, complex and alive as it has been in the last decades.